Beating Your Friend

3-5-90

Perspective: Beating Your Friend

It was a pretty good week for Cobber sports. A Cobber wrestler earned All-American honors at Nationals. Three Cobber wrestlers earned Academic All-American honors.

The track teams had a great weekend at the conference indoor.

And the Lady Cobbers captured a thrilling overtime win at home over St. Thomas to win the NCAA West Regional and advance to the final eight in the NCAA national tournament.

It was a game in which two excellent teams played their hearts out, leaving themselves, the huge crowd, and the coaching staffs emotionally spent. The Lady Cobbers had the good fortune of being ahead when time ran out. A wild celebration ensued.

But, amidst the glee over this victory, there was also a heavy dose of that awkward sadness that comes when you beat your friend in a competition.

Coaches, like competitors in all walks of life, often develop deep friendships with each other. But when life's normal cycle of win-some-lose-some gets disrupted, and one coach nearly always beats the other, there can be more than a twinge of remorse in the heart of the winner. Winning all the time can have its odd and painful aspects.

The Lady Cobber coaches, Duane Siverson and I, have a dear friend in Ted Riverso, St. Thomas' outstanding coach. Ted is a gentle and soft-spoken man with the heart of a lion.

There is both affection and admiration in our relationship. We have been to each other's homes, our children have played together, we have consoled each other in defeat and cheered for each other's success.

But, as has happened so often over the years of our friendship, our absurdly successful team edged out his absurdly successful team once again.

Beating a friend in a game you both want desperately to win is like that feeling many of us had when, as child woodsmen, we shot our first little bird. The thrill of the hunt was exhilarating. The sense of pride over our perfectly-executed shot caused our chest to stick out as we looked around for someone to applaud our talent. We ran, almost dancing, to pick up our dead or dying prey.

But then, as we held the bird in our hands, the reality that there was a real, living, and quite innocent loser in our game sapped a good measure of the joy from the triumph.

As we felt life's warmth leave our victim, we tried to convince ourselves, with varying degrees of success, that it was somehow necessary, or that the victim was somehow deserving of this fate, or that the victim felt no pain.

After Saturday's game at Concordia, as Ted was forced to watch our team and fan's celebrate, while his team sat and cried, we knew Ted felt pain. This was Ted's best team ever. He had taken a team that was not expected to do much and guided them to a deserved place in the nation's top-ten, maybe top-two. His team had played with poise and guts and brains and tenacity and heart all year. But they had come up one game short of the Lady Cobbers' in the 20-game conference race, and then watched a pair of miracle shots by the Lady Cobbers end their season.

We tried to console him. But it was clumsy. It is one thing to try to console a friend who comes to you after having suffered one of fate's quirky blows. But it's different when you are the one who delivered the blow.

We tried to tell him that it was a game neither team should have had to lose. We tried to tell him how brilliant his game plan had been and how proud he should be of the composure with which his team executed that plan. We tried to tell him it was simply dumb luck that we won. All of which was true. He knew it. We knew it.

But the pain was still there. And it won't subside easily.

Fortunately, as so often happens, our players gave us another lesson in how to deal with such things.

The Lady Cobbers and the St. Thomas players have tried over the years to dislike each other, never with much success. They've given each other ghoulish nicknames, ridiculed each others' idiosyncrasies, and accused each other of being too rough or too mean or too lucky.

But, as Saturday night's gut-wrenching game escalated to its inconclusive conclusion, any remnants of enmity between these passionate competitors seemed to melt completely away, replaced by mutual admiration and a knowledge that they were sharing a special stage, with both teams having top-billing, in what would be one of the most emotion-filled nights of their lives.

The post-game events on Saturday night included the naming of a five-person All-Tournament Team, a ceremony which seemed slightly absurd given how brilliantly a couple dozen of these young women had played in the tournament.

The first person called out to center court was the tearful Laurie Trow of St. Thomas, a fierce freshman center who had made one gorgeous play after another throughout the evening. The second player called out was the Cobbers' junior center, Michelle Thykeson, our league's other best player and the one with whom the young Trow is so favorably and deservedly compared. As they stood next to each other, alone at mid-court for the moment, the entire crowd on their feet cheering and clapping, they looked into each others' eyes, wondering if opponents such as they should hug each other at a time such as this. They settled for just a hug with their eyes. But it was exquisite.

No shame in defeat. No haughtiness in victory.

Congratulations to all. Now let's get on with the friendship.

These pages are maintained by Jerry Pyle pyle@cord.edu. These articles are copyrighted © and may not be published or reproduced without the express permission of Jerry Pyle.

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